On Mon, 2007-01-29 at 06:21 -0600, Peter da Silva wrote: > > Of course any RISC architecture, even an "Advanced" RISC Machine, is > > way easier to deal with than any CISC one. > > If you'll stipulate that i860, Sparc, and of course IA64 are not RISC > and the PDP-11 was not CISC I'll accept that. > > I haven't done much more than glance at ARM and Thumb and the rest of > the Acorn/Advanced RISC Machine's instruction set, but the PDP-11 was > beautiful for its day... and there's a whole bunch of hateful RISCs.
I've not had the joy (or maybe hate, who knows?) of programming PDP-11. But on the SPARC side, it's a very nice instruction set to program. Even less instructions than ARM, and more orthogonal as well. When it comes to assembler I find the less instructions the better. The delayed branch thing is only really a minor annoyance. The g0 register on the other hand was a great idea. Cheers, Martin.
